Robert Jenrick has tweeted a list of measures for growth, now compiled into a glossy PDF brochure. What’s interesting about these measures is that they mainly remove artificial inhibitors on growth. Britain’s stagnation is wholly self-inflicted (with a little help from the EU. We’d be a lot better off even even half of them were implemented, but the left would fight to the death to stop any one of them being implemented.

But as a piece of policy work, there are some gaping holes in it. As it happens, I agree with exactly 75% of it, but that’s neither here nor there. Bullet points are not policies. For instance, I agree with all of the measures on unlocking the North Sea and reindustrialising Britain - but the combined effect of these measures will not kick in for at least ten years, begging the question; what’s the interim plan?

There is also a rather large elephant in the room. These measures are not trivial or inconsequential. Several “policies” in Jenrick’s plan would breach (or create clear risks of breaching) the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), the Withdrawal Agreement (including the Northern Ireland Protocol as modified by the Windsor Framework), or both.

The main problem areas are environmental and climate standards (especially via non-regression and level-playing-field rules), goods regulation in Northern Ireland, data protection, and certain equality measures.

TCA Level Playing Field and non-regression

The TCA’s Title XI (Level Playing Field) includes non-regression clauses on environmental and climate protection. Parties may set their own levels of protection but must not weaken or reduce those levels below those in place at the end of the transition period (31 December 2020) *in a manner affecting trade or investment between the Parties*.

This covers the environment (including nature/biodiversity, waste, chemicals, industrial emissions) and climate (including targets and carbon pricing). There is also a commitment to strive to increase levels of protection. Significant divergence that materially impacts trade or investment can trigger a rebalancing mechanism (unilateral countermeasures, subject to arbitration).

Carbon pricing receives specific attention: both sides committed to systems covering electricity generation, heat, industry and aviation, with cooperation and serious consideration of linking schemes. Clear or high-risk breaches include:

*Policy 6 (Abolish the Emissions Trading Scheme):

The UK ETS (successor to the EU ETS) is the core carbon pricing instrument. Abolishing it would remove a system that was effectively in place (via the EU ETS) at the end of the transition period and would directly regress climate protection levels in a way that affects trade (competitiveness and carbon leakage). This engages both the specific carbon-pricing expectations and the general non-regression clause. Recent moves toward linking UK and EU ETS schemes would also be abandoned - which also has consequences worth debating.

*Policy 7 (Halt the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism)** and related measures (e.g., policies 40–41 on excluding Net Zero from financial regulators’ remits and repealing climate-related financial disclosure rules):

These form part of the climate protection framework. Combined with abolishing the ETS, they would, according to the EU, weaken leakage prevention and transparency measures that support the overall climate level of protection.

**Policies 24, 28, 43, 48 and 59** (ban carbon considerations in planning; scrap Net Zero construction rules; abolish EV mandates; abolish the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation; remove the Sustainable Aviation Fuel mandate):

These implement or reinforce climate and product standards that form part of the post-2020 (and in substance 2020-level) protection framework. Weakening them in a way that gives UK producers a competitive advantage on carbon-intensive goods would trigger the non-regression clause if it affects trade or investment. The TCA environment chapter explicitly covers industrial emissions, air quality, waste, and related areas.

Northern Ireland Protocol / Windsor Framework

Under the Protocol (as amended by the Windsor Framework), a defined list of EU law continues to apply in Northern Ireland for goods (Annex 2), with dynamic alignment (“as amended or replaced”).

This includes motor vehicle emissions and type-approval rules, construction products, industrial emissions, waste, energy efficiency, measuring instruments, and elements of the ETS for electricity markets.

Goods at risk of entering the EU single market face full EU rules; the green-lane/UK Internal Market Scheme eases only certain movements that stay in NI. Article 13(3) requires application of listed acts as updated by the EU. The UK cannot unilaterally diverge Northern Ireland from these rules.

Relevant conflicts:

- Abolishing the ETS (policy 6) and related carbon measures would conflict with Annex 2 provisions that include the EU ETS Directive for relevant sectors in NI.

- Scrapping EV mandates, Net Zero construction rules, packaging-related measures (policy 60), and product standards would conflict with Annex 2 rules on vehicles, construction products, waste and energy efficiency that continue to apply in NI. A UK-wide policy that lowers standards for GB while NI must follow higher/different EU rules creates dual regimes, but any attempt to apply the lower standards in NI (or to goods that can move into the single market) breaches the Protocol.

*Policy 15 (Repeal and reform the Habitats Regulations, including Nutrient Neutrality)** and policy 13 (Repeal Biodiversity Net Gain): The Habitats and Birds Directives underpinned nature protection in force in 2020.

While Annex 2 focuses more on trade-related environmental rules, significant weakening can affect goods production, North-South cooperation, and TCA non-regression on nature/biodiversity. Habitats Regulations remain operative in NI; major repeal would create compliance problems.

*Policies 50–52 (re-legalise Imperial units; review and automatically sunset remaining EU law)**:

Measuring instruments and product labelling rules in Annex 2 require metric units for relevant goods in NI. An automatic sunset of retained EU law would directly contradict the obligation to apply listed EU acts dynamically in NI.

Other areas

*Policy 49 (Replace GDPR with a New Zealand-style Privacy Act)**: The TCA includes digital trade and data provisions that presuppose high standards of protection. A substantial lowering of data-protection standards would almost certainly lead to loss (or non-renewal) of the EU’s adequacy decision.

While not a hard “breach” of a prohibition, it would disable free data flows that the agreement facilitates and damage services trade (finance, tech, professional services).

*Policy 62 (Remove the Public Sector Equality Duty)**: Windsor Framework Article 2 requires the UK to ensure no diminution of rights, safeguards and equality of opportunity set out in the relevant part of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement as a result of withdrawal.

This is underpinned by six EU equality directives in Annex 1 (with dynamic alignment) and dedicated mechanisms (NIHRC and Equality Commission). The Public Sector Equality Duty (and NI’s section 75 duty) is a core domestic equality tool. Removing it UK-wide, including its effects in NI, risks being treated as a diminution of equality protections linked to the GFA framework.

Policies on North Sea licensing, housebuilding planning reforms, employment rights, or general sunsetting of quangos do not themselves create direct treaty breaches, though secondary effects (e.g., on environmental assessments or equality duties) could.

Fallout

A government implementing these measures would face rapid EU challenges. Under the TCA, the EU could raise non-regression or level-playing-field issues in specialised committees and then move to arbitration. If a material trade impact is established, rebalancing measures (tariffs or other restrictions on UK goods) become available.

Parallel proceedings under the Withdrawal Agreement could address Protocol breaches, with the possibility of fines, suspension of benefits, or further safeguards. Data-adequacy loss would be near-automatic if GDPR-equivalent protections are dismantled, imposing compliance costs and barriers on services trade almost immediately.

Northern Ireland would experience practical disruption. Dual regulatory regimes would complicate GB–NI goods movements even under green-lane arrangements, raise costs for NI businesses that export to the EU, and create political friction. Unionist and nationalist parties would interpret the changes differently; the Stormont Brake and consent mechanisms could be invoked; and the Irish government and EU institutions would treat Protocol non-compliance as a threat to the single market and to the open border on the island. Markets would price in legal uncertainty, potential tariffs, and the reversal of recent UK–EU cooperation (including ETS linking talks).

Longer-term, the measures would undermine the post-Brexit settlement and any “reset” in UK–EU relations (including lucrative defence arrangements). They would also test the durability of the Windsor Framework arrangements that were designed to stabilise trade and politics in Northern Ireland.

The economic gains from deregulation in Great Britain would be offset, at least in part, by trade barriers, compliance costs for dual standards, lost data flows, and the political and legal costs of treaty disputes.

In short, the policies that most aggressively deregulate climate, environment, product standards and data protection are those most likely to reopen the very frictions the TCA and Windsor Framework were negotiated to manage.

Now you might have cottoned on to the fact that I’ve enlisted Grok to assist here - not least because of how boring it is. I could and probably will pick more holes in it over time, but this isn’t the first time Reform have announced measures that will come into direct conflict with the EU - not least on ECHR withdrawal, welfare, and housing entitlement reforms.

Essentially, there are penalties for implementing most of Jenrick’s measures, to the extent that it raises serious questions about the Brexit treaty settlement - and subsequent questions about the Northern Ireland settlement. So again, I ask… what’s the plan?

Danny Kruger has alluded to these dilemmas on his Substack, implying that a Reform government would abandon the NI Protocol and Windsor Framework. When you take the wider consequences into account, it rather looks like the general intent is to delete all formal treaties with the EU.

While that is a supportable position, you’re going to need one hell of a plan B, not forgetting that energy and reindustrialisation policies will have next to no effect in Reform’s first term. It reopens a lot of bandwidth-intensive politics about Brexit, trade and Northern Ireland, especially if we’re also leaving the ECHR (probably collapsing the GFA). This is while attempting bad optics measures such as repealing the Renter’s Rights act and Employment Rights Act etc.

Taken in the round, much of the public will not understand what is being done or why, and will prove to be hugely unpopular, to the extent that Reform would not win a second term - assuming Reform has the majority and the political capital to do even half of this. This is Brexit scale proposition, with many unanswered questions - not least that of the Northern Ireland border, for which nobody in Reform’s ranks has satisfactory answers.

As such, the proposition demands more than just a glossy brochure and a collection of bullet points. This requires in-depth analysis and a plan. Given the economic and political disruption, with unpredictable second order consequences, we need to see their mitigation measures. I am, of course, extrapolating here, on the basis of my own understanding the consequences of these measures, and it may not be Reform’s intent. But again it begs the question… if that’s not the plan, what is?

Andy Burnham has suggested that all options are on the table as regards Britain’s relationship with the EU - including, according to Westminster gossip, restoring freedom of movement.

I don’t know how much of this I take seriously. I keep in mind the entire Article 50 era when politicians and wonks of all stripes would dream up bespoke concepts without any regard for what Brussels would accept, or what is technically, legally, or politically possible. That same comical insularity persists even today.

In the more immediate term, Burnham is looking to open discussions about emissions trading, youth mobility and an SPS deal, which is at least in the realms of the possible. Anything else is likely just a political signal to energise his base.

My hunch is that Burnham is gearing up for an early election while the party still has an unambiguous lead in the polls. Labour has a clear lead and Burnham is popular in his own right, but it can’t last because it never does. In his position, it makes sense to blame the cost of living on Brexit, and having no ideas how to remedy it, making overtures to the EU is good politics as far as his party is concerned. He will not, however, be in a rush to re-open the Brexit wars.

The small fly in the ointment is that politics on the continent is changing, not least in France, and the French have a track record or vetoing any moves that would make it easier for British agri-exporters. Even an SPS deal might be a little too ambitious for the moment. Burnham may need to offer up freedom of movement as a deal sweetener, but that doesn’t play well in Labour heartlands. My feeling is that Burnham, for reasons that escape me, is the one Labour politician who can claw back some of the votes lost to Reform, but any rowback on Brexit would blow it.

Either way, it goes to show that Brexit is still not a settled issue. Nobody is especially content with the limbo we’re in. For the midwit left, our position leaves us isolated, locked out of the joys of job-killing Net Zero regulation, while the right thinks, with some justification, that we never meaningfully left the EU. At some point the current settlement will be revisited because it was never properly concluded. This is certainly the feeling for many at the top of Reform who would go much further than dumping the Windsor Framework, perhaps even collapsing the entire TCA.

Knowing, then, that this is far from settled domestic politics, I don’t imagine anyone in the European Commission is keen to waste technical and political bandwidth on deepening the relationship with the UK only for the next right wing government to rip up any agreements, especially if ECHR withdrawal is taking on a certain inevitability.

This is where neither side of the divide has compelling arguments. Reform (according to Danny Kruger, at least) would seek to revert to WTO rules (something that would be deeply unpopular and politically suicidal, likely causing an omni-crisis) while any re-join effort by Labour doesn’t answer the question of what we are re-joining and on what basis.

Personally, I would actually find another EU referendum gloriously entertaining just because of who the re-joiners will be rubbing shoulders with. The Restore Britain types will be against joining, but the Zoomer nationalists and neo-Nazis will all be in favour, not least because it's an avenue to getting elected to the European Parliament, and subsequently establishing a far right movement in domestic politics. They see it as a means to forge closer relationships with FN, AfD and other European “right wing” populists who are set to dominate EU politics for the foreseeable future.

What re-joiners also have to spell out is why it would be beneficial for Britain when, in the decade since Brexit, Germany heavy industry has been steadily collapsing under the weight of EU climate policies. I suppose Britain is reasonably well insulated in that we’ve already destroyed our heavy industry.

What seems more likely in the interim is a nothing-burger of an EU reset that does nothing whatsoever to help Britain, but will be sold as a resounding victory for Labour. That may have a certain temporary political utility for Burnham, but it doesn’t change the fact that the national grid is teetering on the brink, the cost of living is soaring, and sentiment on immigration remains at boiling point. It’s almost as though this talk of re-joining is a nostalgic battle re-enactment, having no real idea what to do instead.

My feeling, though, is that the EU is as much in limbo as the UK-EU relationship. There is a populist gun to its head - on energy and immigration, while rifts open up over Ukraine. America seems to be losing patience with Zelensky and the EU, and Europe’s economic outlook does not look promising. A series of challenging events is on the horizon, for which Europe’s talentless political class has no answers. European elites have the will to continue the fight with Russia, but not the means, or the backing of their own people. Soon enough, the very last thing on anybody’s mind will be meat export rules and cheese regulations.

Had Reform given us any outward indication that it was getting its act together, I would never have taken a second look at the Tory party. I’m not tribal about these things. If the Tory party looked like it was serious then I would be the first to say so.

For a time, I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. There are some good MPs in the party who understand the stakes. The problem, though, is that Badenoch isn’t one of them - and she sets the direction of the party. She has concluded, with some justification, that there is no point following Reform around like a lost puppy, and is instead remodelling as a liberal centre-right party.

Here it’s necessary to understand Badenoch’s own support base. She’s popular with metropolitan liberals because of her position on the gender identity debate. She’s got a fan base of liberal women, gays, and Times Radio listeners (same difference). She’s popular with shire Tories and the affluent middle class from the places not yet polluted by “diversity”.

Her appeal extends to Lib Dems and old school Greens (from before the Greens became an Islamic revolutionary party). She is also celebrated by the Tory aristocracy (they who may sympathise with Reform but would rather die than defect) - most of whom are liberals who just love the fact Badenoch is a black conservative. As such, she was never going to be able to convincingly compete for the Reform vote. She tried it. It didn’t work. Reform voters have made up their minds.

Her recent moves explain her electoral calculus. Her recent reshuffle resurrected the careers of the One Nation rot in the party, not least opening the door to Penny Mordaunt, who appeals to a certain segment of the middle class.

I suspect the writing has been on the wall for some time. The defection of Danny Kruger was probably once such indicator. His NatCon cultural Christianity shtick was the political equivalent of farting in a lift. He must have realised that under Badenoch, we was in the far wilderness (Not that he’s found a home for it in Reform). Badenoch will have realised at this point that the conservative wing of the conservative party no longer exists in any meaningful sense.

The only reason I was willing to give Badenoch the benefit of the doubt was that she had launched her Culture and Integration Commission, said to include Toby Young and Robert Tombs. The Tories still have considerable intellectual resources to bring to bear, and often turn up some compelling stuff when they put their thinking caps on.

We were told the commission would publish an interim report, but I can’t see anything substantive. Little was said at the party conference, except for an allusion to the work of Katherine Birbalsingh. Badenoch opened the party’s conference in Birmingham with a pledge to defend the “norms and expectations” of Britain, saying that the UK risks splitting into “separatist ghettos”.

Leaving aside that Badenoch is away with the fairies, and that Britain is already split into separatist ghettos, her mention of Birbalsingh was the key tell. The liberal Tory faithful, Gove especially, absolutely loves Birbalsingh (for reasons that escape me). Interestingly, the subtitle of her new book is “How the left and right broke multiculturalism - and how to fix it”. This is pretty much where Badenoch also is coming from - and that is why the Tory party is a write off.

Looking at the Conservative party framework for dealing with these issues, they are looking to shut the stable door two decades after the horse has bolted, grown old, died, and now resides in a half-used tube of UHU glue in my desk drawer. These are solutions for 2006, not 2026. Any hope of repairing the social fabric, thin as it was, was killed off with the Boriswave.

For me, any talk of repairing multiculturalism now is for the birds. Having grown up in Bradford, you'll have a hard time persuading me it ever worked in the first place. The grooming epidemic tells you most of what you need to know.

But back then, we had a mostly homogenous society, and a manageable number of ethnic minorities, at a level where they might have integrated had immigration been managed. But not since we flung open the borders and allowed in the dregs of the third world who can't be integrated into anything - especially when they're categorically not wanted. There is no useful place in our society for low IQ South Asians and Africans with marginal language skills. All they bring is their own ethnic strife and backward customs.

There may be Londoners who have a different perception of multiculturalism, having grown up in "vibrant" parts of the city, but that's back when native Britons were still the prevailing authority. There was an order of things. Our order. But now that order is diluted and disintegrating, with the police hamstrung by notions of diversity and cultural sensitivity.

Now, you go into London and natives are nowhere to be seen, and third world imports haven't even mastered the basics of civilisation like queuing for a bus. Third worldism has displaced civilisation, and anybody who has the means to move away from it does so. No native Briton wants their own kids to be an ethnic minority in their school. It's not so much the great replacement as the great displacement.

The main “separatist enclaves” are now white Britons who want nothing to do with the “multiculturalism” that was inflicted on us. Everyone wants to escape the crime, squalor and disorder that third worlders bring with them. They migrate here to enjoy what is abolished by their presence.

Meanwhile, it is impressed upon us with menaces that we're supposed to passively accept this invasion without comment or complaint, as we're forced to compete for housing, healthcare and employment in our own homeland. All the while, our high trust society evaporates and our communities disperse. Random psychotic Africans brandishing machetes is now an every day occurrence.

The whole time the missing element of multiculturalism was our consent. It wasn't given in the first place, and our tolerance up to now has proven to be a catastrophic error. But not one we are obliged to endure. It can be reversed, and one way or another it will be. It will either be done peacefully and humanely, or the regime will continue to inflict this misery on us and it will be done some other way. We're getting to the point where I don't care which, so long as it is done. Right now, the main obstacle is the Tory party itself because it still clings on to the idea that any of this is repairable with managerial tinkering.

The split on the British right is now exclusively to do with immigration. The Tories are responsible for the Boriswave, and even if they promised to fully reverse it, we would see the same mithering about "fairness" from Tory MPs that we see from Labour backbenchers. They cannot be trusted to clean up their own mess, especially not after Badenoch's conference speech. Her undisguised contempt for Reform was a mask off moment.

But then Reform is also a problem. There is a gulf between what Reform members expect and what Farage would actually do. While Yusuf is tough on the rhetoric, Farage keeps rowing it back. In this, I have some sympathies with Farage. He's realistic about what can be achieved in the current political climate, and knows the limits of what the wider electorate will accept. Going balls to the wall on immigration is a losing proposition for his party.

Restore, meanwhile, does not accept this - and is skirting the far reaches of politically acceptable discourse. While my sympathies lean in that direction, Restore lacks the necessary realism and pragmatism. Their own deportations policy is workable, but not immediately deliverable, and the electorate is not yet ready for that conversation. It's more pragmatic to take what you can get for now.

I do understand, though, why Restore does not like or trust Farage. Farage's cautious realism is commendable, but on a more fundamental level, he keeps letting it slip that he doesn't think the damage is repairable, isn't willing to try, and doesn't care that much about it. Some men only have so much to give and he's given it. He's spent, and the new generation of right wing nationalists are not willing to accept defeat. Nor should they.

But that leaves us with something of an impasse that keeps the right out of power while Labour makes everything worse. This is a near intractable dilemma. What's clear is this doesn't get resolved by 2029. I don't know if there is a party political solution. What I do know is that the Tory party has not changed, cannot be trusted, and cannot be given the benefit of the doubt.

My feeling over the last three years is that there has to be more of a reason to vote Reform than just punishing the Tories. I was half right. It is preferable if Reform professionalises to the extent that it could form a viable government, but that's not going to happen. If, though, it continues to keep the Tories out of power then that is sufficient. The economy can wait. This dispute is over a more fundamental, existential matter where compromise is akin with surrender.

The line has to be that the Tories will not be allowed anywhere near power for as long as they are a liberal party. If that means a permanent block then so be it. It just means party politics isn't the mechanism by which this is resolved. There are other means at our disposal.

Eventually things will worsen to the extent that the public is ready for a more robust approach, and Farage will retire eventually, at which point there is likely to be more unity on the right. Farage is a big part of the problem. But once Reform, under new leadership, is unambiguous on its approach to immigration and deportations, Restore will evaporate. Reform will then have to pair up with the street protest movement to keep the system off balance until the Tories are no more. It may take a decade, but that's how it has to be. The main objective, in the interim, is to bury Badenoch's party for good.

I’ve been surprised by some of the comments on yesterday’s post in which I set out ten basic demands for a street protest movement. The list is just my suggestion, but the point is that we’ve seen dozens of protests and demonstrations, and there is never any formal agenda behind them. That’s why they seldom accomplish anything. If we are going to assemble at scale then we must be able to deliver a clear set of actionable demands. We can always come back for more if we succeed.

While I’ve been making the point for some time that we do need to develop a detailed policy platform, that kind of work is the domain of political parties - to refine their offering and give them direction. It’s as much so that political parties themselves know what they would do with power. A street movement, though, communicates through banners and placards, so any demands have to be concise and self-explanatory, and likely to secure the agreement of everyone involved.

This is where we have to learn from left wing protests movements. If this is going to succeed then it will need some serious money behind it, and we’ll have to provide pre-printed placards just as the left does. Very often we see a narrow selection of well crafted messages centred on specific objectives and themes. Our demands have to speak to our main priorities, which at this point is less to do with constitutional tinkering or broader policy objectives, and more to do with existential matters such as immigration.

My thinking here is that there is no uniting the right under a party political banner. The ethno-nationalist right belongs to a very specific ideological nationalist framework that has very little in common with conservatism, and there is major disagreement on fundamental principles. As we have seen with Restore Britain, Thatcherite civic nationalism does not cohabit well with doctrinal British nationalism, and neither fits in especially with other strains of right wing thought. They all tend to dislike each other which is why there is no political unity.

I’ve lost count of the number of “Unite the right” initiatives, all of which have come to nothing, because the British right is not homogenous and is mainly defined by its opposition to the left. That entrenched disunity is what makes party politics a futile endeavour for the time being, and I don’t think that is going to resolve any time soon, and especially not while Farage is in the mix. He is the barrier to any insurgent party developing a coherent policy platform.

Because of that, the right is probably going to lose the next election, especially if it drops before 2029, so in the interim we have to do something useful. We have seen Tommy Robinson jamborees in London, and while they do serve a function in letting the wider public know that they’re not alone in how they feel, and that we are not “far right thugs”, this activity is of limited use because it isn’t making any specific demands of government, and there is no focus to any of this activity. That’s why a charter of demands is needed.

The list items I suggested were chosen because they’re understandable, most of the right agrees with them, are immediately actionable, and in my view the most pressing concerns. You may have better suggestions.

It certainly could be the case that a street movement publishes a pamphlet elaborating on these demands, but this is not about harvesting policy ideas. It about finding the distilled priorities of everyone who identifies as right wing, and converting them into protest sentiments.

The point is to popularise and prioritise. The job of political parties is to turn such sentiments into actual policy, but a street movement doesn’t deal in detail. It deals in exclusively in sentiment. The job of the street movement is to make itself impossible to ignore - to the extent that there is political gain if parties support the charter. This runs concurrently with party political activity.

Ideally, such a charter should seek to secure a million signatures (a people’s petition) backed by regular street demonstrations around the country, preferably with charter ambassadors in parliament. I already have some ideas on how to establish this. It will involve distributing materials and banners at demonstrations, and building up a network of serious people who understand the mission. We don’t even have to organise the protests ourselves, we can simply turn the ones that already exist into something more focussed.

I’ve written at length about the need for political parties of the right to establish an intellectual foundation and a policy platform. I put a lot of energy into making that case. I failed, and it was a complete waste of energy. It’s not going to happen. As such, I no longer think there is any merit in investing energy into any political party of the right. I think the right will lose in 2029, and it’ll be much deserved.

This is as much because of the fragmentation of the right. Restore is a peripheral party but can still cause Reform to lose out on around twenty or more seats, while a heated contest between Reform and the Tories will likely cancel each other out.

Calls to unite the right, meanwhile, are futile. They are too ideologically diverse, divided as much by generational attitudes, and there are too many wounded egos in the mix.

I also don’t think there is a party political solution at least until Farage is out of the picture. He is the barrier to progress on a number of fronts. For as long as he is in the mix Reform will continue to be a rudderless populist movement - too right wing for the mainstream and too non-committal for the right. Nobody is quite sure what a Reform government would actually do, and the right does not trust Farage at all.

That begs the question as to what we do in the meantime. I actually think Danny Tommo had the right idea. The right must develop a protest movement. The problem with that, mind you, is that Tommo’s Patriot Platform model it it is inherently tied to the small boats crisis, and as such it will wane in relevance over the winter months when the seas are too rough. Any protest movement must be a sustained effort towards a specific set of objectives.

This is where I’ve been less than impressed with the Tommy Robinson “Unite the Kingdom” rallies, in that they’re not saying very much and they aren’t demanding anything. While they do attract very large numbers, there is no lasting effect, and no real message is sent to the powers that be. It may also evaporate completely if Tommy Robinson is sent to prison.

On that score, though I bear no ill feeling towards Tommy Robinson, and wish him the best of luck in his legal woes, it might be as well to have him out of the way in order to start from scratch. What’s needed is a movement with a codified agenda. The right is not going to unite, but it should not be beyond our abilities to agree on six to ten basic demands we can all agree on.

Over on X, I suggested the list should look something like the following:

1. Stop the boats
2. Deport all illegals
3. Abolish ILR
4. Stop Islamic sectarianism
5. End two tier justice
6. End benefits for foreigners
7. End multiculturalism
8. End mass immigration
9. Homes for British people only
10. Pass a free speech bill

While there are other demands on the right, it has to be a core set of achievable demands that requires no explanation, with no room for the usual quibbling.

I still think that policy development is a worthwhile thought exercise, which is why I’m steeling myself for another round of updates and revisions to manifestoproject.org, but any demands of a street movement have to be concise, self-explanatory, and immediately actionable.

This is not about presenting a manifesto. It’s about a core set of demands we all agree on. Again, I point out that there is little point in advancing a full manifesto for the whole of the right because the British right is only really defined by what it opposes. There are several factions that disagree on fundamentals such as the NHS and housing, and we do not have the time or ability to resolve these philosophical disagreements.

Ideally such a charter would be publicly endorsed by key figures on the right, preferably with some Westminster endorsement. It should form the basis of a cross party campaign in conjunction with the street movement. Ideally, it needs an ambassador in Westminster, preferably standing as an independent who is there exclusively to press this agenda.

I’ve already alluded to this in the past, suggesting that it could provide a purpose for Restore Britain, but my sources are telling me that Rupert Lowe is still detached from the inner workings of his party, and his lieutenants are still consorting with the far right. Any association with the hardline ethnonationalist antisemitic faction is the kiss of death for any movement or party. Consequently, this would have to be an independent initiative.

For the moment, the right is fixated with the 2029 election, and many believe it is our last chance to save the country, but I don’t think we can afford such fatalism. We’re not beaten yet. It just seems very likely that we could face another seven years of Labour misrule, in which time the right is not going to resolve its party political differences. I also think things need to get a lot worse before we start seeing the kind of popular mobilisation necessary to achieve change.

With that in mind, we now need to be thinking about strategy and tactics for the interim. We need to build a network of serious people who recognise the deficiencies of right wing party politics, and promote an agenda that everyone can get behind. We’ve run out of time for the narcissism of small differences.

What notionally started as education protests in France have unravelled into something much more unruly. These things have a way of taking on a life of their own until they become wanton destruction for its own sake. It has not gone unnoticed who is doing most of it, along with the ever-present flag of the Islamo-leftist revolution. Of course, everyone will craft their own narrative to suit. Expect absurd equivocation. No lessons will be learned.

As it happens, I don’t think it’s all that serious - yet. It is not out of the ordinary for France. We’ve had similar in the UK, not least the Croydon riots. It doesn’t take very long for life to return to normal, and for everyone to forget about it. The needle returns to the start of the song, and we all sing along like before.

It is, though, a small taster of how bad things can get, and how things will get. This is what happens when you have a surplus of useless people. You can pretend this disorder is all about education, or the lack of opportunities, but there is never going to be a place in society for barely domesticated, barely literate animals who should never have been admitted in the first place.

What makes a broader unravelling inevitable is the deindustrialisation of Europe, along with an already fraying social contract. Moreover, the kind of services work that employs otherwise useless migrants is contingent on disposable income, which is fast becoming a thing of the past. Things are just too badly degraded, and our politicians far too inadequate to avoid an increased tempo of disorder, and it’s only a matter of time before it is Europe-wide. It is further exacerbated by a weak response from security services.

It also points to what could happen in the event of right wing governments attempting to do something about it. One bungled deportation raid and we’re looking at a cascade of violence. There is no scenario where this problem simply goes away. The future holds mass disorder events beyond the capacity of the state to bring under control - especially with a police force still hamstrung by political correctness and racial sensitivity training.

There are certain precautions the state could and should make, but in all probability will not. While the looting is opportunistic, there are elements to this disorder which are orchestrated by subversives, the kind who should be closely monitored by police, but they will instead fixate on the “far right” and the intellectual effort will go on curtailing social media. Meanwhile, whatever transpires, the far right will find inventive ways to blame Jews.

What makes things especially precarious for Britain is the creaking state of the national grid. Today we’ve seen erratic frequencies going outside the normal range, and if it keeps up, and there’s a cold and still spell, then we’re going to need rioters to set cars on fire if only to stay warm. There is also the small problem that if riot do ransack our towns, we’d be hard pressed to notice the difference (looking at the state of some of them). Looters are going to be sorely disappointed unless they’re looking to stock up on vape fluid.

The main takeaway from this latest round of disorder is that it plays into the hands of European populist movements such as FN and AfD, but they still have time to blow it completely. I’m of the view that this street level disorder is a symptom of the political impasse where no single party or faction is able to secure an unassailable mandate. This is certainly the case in Britain where the right is split three ways and neither main faction is an appealing prospect, thereby handing a dysfunctional Labour party another term.

The real danger, I think, is not a sudden flare up of violence. It is that low level disorder becomes so frequent that we become indifferent to it and simply adapt to it as the new normal. In some respects we are already there. We now broadly accept that we have lost our cities, to the extent that serious unrest doesn’t directly affect the native population. It simply becomes a spectator sport.

It may even be that the civil war narratives circulating on X this weekend are wishful thinking. Civil wars are movement towards a resolution of sorts. A worsening of the status quo just means the permanent end of high trust society - where you can only keep what you can hold by force of arms. As such, this could be the beginning of the end of European civilisation - with no remedy in sight.

Reform is embroiled in another undercover reporting “scandal”. This time it’s relatively trivial, but everyone’s making out like some offhand quasi-racist remarks by two nonentity councillors are earth shatteringly offensive. Personally, I don’t think it plays particularly well for the media because it looks like they’re basically spying on the party while giving the rest of them a free pass, thereby undermining the impact of the Channel 4 sting operation a few weeks ago.

As Steve Edginton remarks “This is not the Truman show. Political parties need space to debate policies, vet candidates, discuss strategy and reject bad ideas. A suggestion made in a private meeting is not necessarily a policy. A foolish remark or joke is not always evidence of corruption or bigotry”.

For my part, I don’t even care. It actually looks worse for the Tories when they pile in, making themselves look even more like Lib Dems. Reform should be more concerned about their persistent slump in the polls - which is more to do with their overall performance. It’s not one thing. It’s a culmination of things.

It is worth recording that a few days ago, Zia Yusuf again openly contradicted Suella Braverman who has stated, quite accurately, that she is not English. In an interview by Sophy Ridge, he went on to say “But I will also say, every single person that you just mentioned there, whether it's Saka, Ashley Cole, Rio Ferdinand, Nasser Hussain, who I grew up watching when I went to the cricket, the idea that those people aren't English, is an alien concept to me. I would respectfully disagree with people, who make the opposite argument”.

I note that Nasser Hussain was born in Madras, India into a Muslim family. Zia Yusuf thinks he's English. This is part of what is now a long running debate about nationality, ethnicity and identity, where again the politicians are completely incoherent and light years behind the comprehension curve. The debate last week was re-sparked by yet another foreign born individual taking up a seat in Westminster. Sagal Abdi-Wali was born in Somalia in 1984.

This is relevant because the British people are being shunted out of their own law making process, cheered on by a Kashmiri belonging to a party led by a Nigerian anchor baby. Everyone's allowed to acknowledge their ethnicity, except the English. You don’t have to be a full-blown ethnonationalist to recognise that this is a problem and that it is not right. It is something the insurgent party of the right should have a coherent position on, but can’t even agree on basic definitions of ethnicity and nationality.

It is further problematic because it’s also a reflection of the growing sectarianism and separatism in wider society - which demands a robust policy response. If Reform’s leader-in-waiting is civic nationalist to the extent that a foreign born individual qualifies as English, then we simply cannot expect policy coherence from Reform at all. Braverman might be singing a pleasing tune, but just like Danny Kruger, she is out on her own.

It is precisely this ambiguity that means Reform is not trusted by the right. This week Reform has pledge to close the asylum system entirely in a series of announcements calibrated to fend off Restore Britain, but more and more people are starting to notice that Reform policy announcements aren’t worth the paper they’re not even written on. We’re still seeing senior Reform figures undermining each other because there is still no fixed definition of what the party is for.

What’s interesting about the other hidden ITV camera footage is how the party was so keen to throw Rear Admiral Chris Parry under the bus following his remarks about David Lammy. As Parry notes:

People will remember Lammy's vehement advocacy for trillions of pounds of reparations from the United Kingdom and his strident identification as a person from the Caribbean.

In February 2025, Caribbean nations were pressing hard for reparations. Lammy had recently been to Guyana (where he also holds citizenship) and the Caribbean, reportedly on government business, and had expressed his support for reparations. I therefore tweeted that he should ‘go back to the Caribbean where loyalty lies’. The timing and wording of the tweet were heavily context specific.

Anyone viewing the tweets objectively would see that the issue was about reparations not race and I was highlighting David Lammy’s much-trumpeted divided loyalties as Foreign Secretary as a dual citizen and his previous claims to be a ‘proud Caribbean’, demanding reparations.

Against my better judgment, I was initially silenced by the Party’s media team and unable to explain the nuance.

This meant that the story became increasingly distorted as it was exploited by hostile politicians, a truth-bending Prime Minister and a media feeding frenzy at my expense. I was subsequently pressured to apologise and reluctantly consented to save face for the Party and out of loyalty to Nigel Farage.

This is central to the debate about nationality and ethnicity. There is an established pattern of ethnic minority politicians picking and choosing their identities at will, often demonstrating divided loyalties, or a willingness to use their position to advance their ethnic interests. This, more than anything, is what is eroding any kind of shared civic identity, giving rise to ethnic identity politics among the natives. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Parry is right to call it out.

It would appear, though, that Reform is unwilling to make a stand on this point, thereby not even living up to the standards of robust civic nationalism, begging the question what the party is even for.

Moreover, we’ve seen big hitters in Reform come and go, but to alienate and lose Parry of all people is just boneheaded. For readers who don’t know, Rear Admiral Dr Chris Parry was a crewman on XP142 (pictured above), a Westland Wessex HAS.3 nicknamed Humphrey, which delivered the depth charges that helped disable the Argentine submarine ARA Santa Fe.

As well as being a bona fide war hero (certainly in my eyes), Dr Parry has, as I understand it, also authored a number of defence reviews which would have made him an important policy resource, especially since Reform, quite famously, doesn’t have a defence spokesman. Not that the party is at all interested in policy.

Parry’s remarks about Lammy were entirely defensible, and should have been defended. Parry would have been wildly popular as part of Reform’s top team - and would likely have walked a Westminster election contest in Portsmouth. It all rather points to a party that is pointless, incompetent, and spineless.

With a budget looming and no more money incoming for defence, The Telegraph reports that soldiers and officers at the 3rd (UK) Division who were due to qualify later this year as tank commanders on a Cyclone exercise have had their training slashed.

The decision was made to save money and left the Army without a full complement of Challenger 2 tank commanders. Senior commanders are said to be “tearing their hair out”. Despite this, No 10 waiting until next autumn to say how and when it will adequately fund defence.

Meanwhile, it has not gone unnoticed that the UK has committed more than £88 million in humanitarian and early recovery support for Palestinians in the current financial year.

All the same, I really don’t know why we are wasting our time with main battle tanks. The likes of Tom Tugendhat would gladly see Britain joining the fight in Ukraine, but that isn’t going to happen so there is no point in equipping for such a fight. Since we have too few tanks to mount a major armoured offensive, with overall numbers due to decline after the Challenger 3 upgrade, we might as well just give the remaining Challengers to Ukraine and let them get on with it.

Essentially, there is no point going to the enormous expense of operating main battle tanks unless we’re procuring them in serious numbers. Armoured assaults are all about mass, assuming you can still make the case that large armoured formations are still relevant on the modern battlefield.

There are plenty of people lining up to tell me that tanks are still relevant, not least because counter drone technologies are improving all the time, but it’s still the case that the modern battlefield is monitored by an elaborate grid of sensors and cameras, meaning that no major movement goes undetected. It becomes impossible to assemble any kind of force mass for a major breakthrough. This is why we haven’t seen a repeat attempt as a Summer offensive in Ukraine.

Either way, I think it’s a redundant argument as far as British procurement is concerned. If the land war in Ukraine escalates into a wider war (which seems unlikely) it is more Germany and Poland’s problem than ours, and a smaller British force would probably be the backstop, at which point we need something fast with a big gun. We are now back to tank destroyer doctrine, which points to something wheeled akin with the Centauro 2 or the French EBRC Jaguar.

My thinking on this is that we probably aren’t going to get sucked into Ukraine and by the time Britain does equip and train for such a deployment, the war will be over, or in a frozen state. If we are going to spend money on toys for the army then we are as well having something air deployable, preferably two at a time, on an A400M. Instability in Africa could end up being the more serious threat to Europe, especially in terms of displaced peoples.

As much as anything, I just don’t think Challenger 3 is going to be up to much. I watch a lot of defence and geopolitics YouTube lately, not least because it's the closest thing there is to a cure for insomnia. Most of the defence equipment analysis is geeky Top Trumps kit-stroking, that actually tells us nothing useful.

What I've found particularly interesting is the debate around Challenger 3. Following the deployment of Challenger 2 in Ukraine, it's consistently being re-branded as the "sniper tank" owing to the accuracy and lethality of its gun (Which Challenger 3 won’t actually have). Never mind that it's under-powered an obese.

The term "sniper tank" is derived from its usage in Ukraine, where it skirts the edge of the battlefield and picks off targets from a distance. On that basis, the battlefield asset is the gun, not the vehicle. What matters most is mobility - which it doesn't have. Its role as a sniper tank is what it's relegated to because if it does venture out into open ground, it is shat on in about nine seconds flat.

As such, the deliberate rebranding as a lethal "sniper" is to repackage expensive and heavy junk. Once facet of sniping is stealth, which it simply does not have in a battlefield dominated by sensors, cameras and satellites. It's about as stealthy as, well, a 75 tonne tank. As such, the procurement of Challenger 3 is a triumph of rebranding and advertising over military doctrine. If we insist on having that capability then Centauro 2 (pictured below) would do the job about as well.

Meanwhile, the Tories seem to think there is money in the kitty to spend £10bn on a missile defence shield - which, as yet, nobody is able to define. I would have thought, what with being an island nation, and heavily dependent on imports by sea, some sort of navy would be a good idea - as opposed to fantasy fighting armadas for a land war we are unlikely to fight.

Most people of my political disposition wrote off Kemi Badenoch from the very beginning. In the absence of viable alternatives, though, I gave her the benefit of the doubt. She at least deserved a shot at reshaping her party and she was at least making all the right noises.

By that, I mean that she didn’t simply rattle off the usual policy tropes and instead committed to a policy process. This, I thought, was the correct approach and refreshing change from the way the Slop Right does things. I was certainly pleased that she took the time to properly investigate the ECHR matter even if she didn’t give it the proper consideration in terms of political feasibility.

As such, I was expecting a good deal more from the party at this conference, which has been lacklustre to say the least. I’m away from home this week so I’m not as tuned in as I might have been, but in any case, nothing has cut through the noise. All I’ve caught wind of is a car crash interview in which Badenoch appears to have no idea about the specifics of her missile defence shield policy.

I didn’t expect her to have a full command of the mechanics of it since it is a conceptual proposal but it’s clear she doesn’t even have a conceptual notion of what she’s talking about. As much as anything, it tells us that she is not on top of her own party’s policy agenda, which is pretty important when you’re the actual leader.

That’s not the only problem either. The party has published a pamphlet outlining their broader policy approach. While it contains some of what you might expect to see, it’s mainly remarkable for how threadbare it is. It contains a short chapter on immigration and asylum but it’s not going to win over any Reform voters.

What’s conspicuous by its absence is the interim report from Badenoch’s Culture and Integration Commission, which was supposed to be launched at the conference. Perhaps I missed it, but it’s the one thing I’ve been waiting to see for months - to see exactly how serious they are. It appears that all we’re going to get on that score is more burbling about Birbalsingh’s Michaela Community School where teaching kids all the words to Jerusalem is supposed to make them fully integrated citizens.

Taken in the round, with the party having cleared Penny Mordaunt to run again, and Badenoch’s appointment of Tom Tugendhat and Ben Obese-reJecty to run foreign policy and defence, the new Tory party is starting to look a lot like the old one. As one tweeter remarks “Ideology aside, one of the great mysteries about politics in the 2020s has been the relentless promotion of Penny Mordaunt as a somehow substantial figure to whom we need to pay attention”.

I now get the sense that whatever image of policy competence and seriousness Badenoch was trying to project has no actual substance, and if ever the party did reflect on what went wrong and why, the lessons have already been forgotten. The tough rhetoric of six months ago abated, there is no sign of this intellectual renaissance, and there’s no real sense of the seriousness of our predicament. This is the party of half-measures.

I think I’ve been fairer than most in at least giving Badenoch the time to find her feet, but in the final analysis she doesn’t have what it takes to build something presentable with the raw materials she has. She was always going to struggle if she followed Reform around like a lost puppy, so that demanded a different tack. Substance over presentation. Instead, she’s simply leaned into her party’s One Nation tendency, making it very much a tone deaf metropolitan liberal party. Exactly the kind we kicked out in 2024.

Some people are just useless to society. There are degrees of usefulness. As a political blogger I’m somewhere down the bottom, but on a very basic level it’s instilled into me not to cheat, steal or kill, and despite my flaws I’m still possessed of certain social graces that allow me to participate in civilisation - even though I generally choose not to.

Civilisation can just about tick over even with a surplus of useless people. Just look at Scotland. But it ceases to function when there is an abundance of useless people, who couldn’t contribute to society even if they wanted to - who have little grasp of the language or the culture or the unwritten rules. The sort of things that we are now having to encode into pamphlets for recent arrivals such as reminders not to shit in the street and rape women.

What is absolutely terminal for society is when those individuals are led to believe they are owed a certain standard of living, and they don’t have to contribute something to the society they live in.

This is what produces the low level criminality and anti-social behaviour that eats at a society like a cancer. Ordinarily we keep a lid on it through enforcement of public codes, with prison as a deterrent. That model is quite successful, but only to a point. It is contingent on the majority still being able to contribute, behave properly and add value.

When that ratio begins to tilt in the opposite direction, you get more or less what we have now, where public order is hanging by a thread, and can disintegrate at any moment, just as it’s doing in France right now.

Where it gets especially dangerous is when you have a surplus of feral men with no skills, no essential worth, and a belief that anything that isn’t nailed down is their for the taking. Any society built on a model of social trust in the public domain soon collapses.

We’re seeing the beginnings of this where the basic model of food retail is becoming a thing of the past, where prime cuts of meat and cheese are held in security lockers. That’s how it starts. Then you see the frightening dynamic of third world men loitering outside nightclubs, waiting like hyenas for a stray to wander lose of the herd. Or worse, loitering around schools.

There is no real work for such people. At most there are menial low pay service jobs, which are entirely contingent on disposable income - meaning that there is increased competition even for this work in a shrinking economy. Their only other avenue is organised crime. That’s where we’re at now, and it’s happening in broad daylight under our very noses.

That’s when they join gangs and compete with each other for territory, and this is how marginal districts turn into no-go areas even in the daytime. Throw in a dose of religious extremism and sectarianism, and soon you have tribal fiefdoms and the sort of rampant corruption that turns no-go areas into outright slums, where refuse is no longer collected and piles up in the streets. Squalor.

Soon after, the streets are occupied by foreign gangs, many of whom are at war with each other. This is how we lose the cities, and soon after the towns and suburbs. This is how a civilisation quietly dies.

There comes a point where no social policy or welfare programme can turn it around. You cannot assimilate the unwilling, much less civilise the uncivilised. You have two options. Permanent civil unrest and third worldism, or remigration. For native Europeans this is now an existential matter. Do nothing and die, surrendering civilisation to anarchy and squalor, or step up and take back what is yours.

I have lost any patience with party politics, and I think the British right is a complete write-off. Even if it can win an election, it doesn’t get us anywhere. It will be defeated by its own incompetence and lack of preparation. They don’t understand the nature of the problems thus will get nowhere near solutions. As far as the most pressing concern goes, immigration, I think we have to take to the streets to make our feelings known. I have more faith in “far right thugs” than any politician.

Still, though, I am occasionally reminded that there are still some people seriously engaged in politics. They just don’t go anywhere near the right wing parties. I have a good relationship with two or three SDP people, all of whom are impressive people in their own right.

For me, the SDP is a bit too lefty. They claim to be neither left wing or right wing, but in my view, if you are left wing on housing then you are left wing party. It’s not more complicated than that.

All the same, I was pretty devastated to see the departure of William Clouston as leader. I’ve met him at least a couple of times and was suitably impressed. He speaks with a coherence and sincerity, which is largely absent from our politics.

I had serious doubts as to whether the SDP could find anyone even half as good as Clouston. As readers will know, one of the key tests of any party is the whether it can withstand the departure of its own leader - and that test is also the test of leadership quality. Certainly, both Restore and Reform will struggle without their figureheads - because they are personality cults.

But then the SDP does tend to attract high calibre people, and I am pleased to see someone in the ranks is capable of stepping up to the plate. Eleanor Rofe is the clear frontrunner - and a welcome change of gear for the party.

While Clouston was/is good at presenting the philosophy and the arguments, Eleanor evidently has a realistic plan, and the industry experience to put it into action. It’s the same brand of quiet competence I’ve come to expect.

I’m not an SDP member, but if I was, I would vote for Rofe. It’s not good enough for a leader just to make compelling arguments and trot out snappy slogans. For sure, that works towards raising the profile of the party and the likeability of the leader, but you also need to do all the behind the scenes work that often gets neglected. That’s why Restore Britain is the mess it is. Nobody is taking care of the details - and it really shows.

Rofe recognises that building a party is contingent on building a solid organisation, and has a business record of doing exactly that. She has an actual plan. Unlike the other parties, the SDP does have an intellectual foundation, and a reasonable outline of basic policies. That’s been a process of continuous development under Clouston and that process must continue.

But a party is more than just a stack of policy papers. Politics is as much about people. You need a team of credible people. People you can look at and envisage as a cabinet - capable of running a competent government.

That’s what we don’t get from the slopulist parties - neither of which have developed any talent of their own. They promised us serious candidates but seem to actively repel them. It is to Clouston’s enormous credit that the SDP survives without him and that there are people of a similar calibre ready to step in and take it further. The foundations are there, and now we need to see a full spectrum of presentable, expert spokesmen pushing high quality policy and stress tested ideas.

Most parties mistake activity for productivity. They engage in the process of electioneering for its own sake, without having a product to sell. It’s like sending Avon ladies out with an empty suitcase. Any serious party must build the product first and then build the message delivery apparatus. Anything else is just noisemaking. It can maybe win elections, but it cannot deliver results.

I can immediately tell Eleanor is serious and committed, with a wealth of experience she can bring to the role, and I know for a fact she has some very capable people around her. She deserves her shot. We need at least one serious party in the game, however futile it may feel right now.

Like I say, I think that it's a bit late in the day for party politics, but small parties like the SDP can still serve a function - as agenda driving quasi-think tanks, and a means to channel middle England's disaffection into meaningful representation (especially on a local level).

The SDP is more likely to achieve that than the vacuous slopulist parties of the right who tend to attract cranks. All they do is make noise and spend more time fighting each other. I sort of regard the SDP as what the Lib Dems should be, and in a parallel universe would be were they not rudderless, thick, and unprincipled.

If at the other end of this political turmoil, the SDP becomes the replacement third party of Westminster politics then it's to everyone's benefit. Eleanor looks like she's up to it. She is very obviously the right fit for the party and I'll be interested to see how it develops. Unless the party can do as good as Clouston or better, there is no further point in it. Eleanor has some big shoes to fill.

The Guardian reports that Andy Burnham has opened the door to the UK rejoining the EU, saying Britain could “go all the way”, as he prepares to reconsider Labour’s post-Brexit red lines. The prime minister used a series of interviews after his emotional Labour conference speech to spell out how wide-ranging his consideration of Britain’s future with Brussels could be because Brexit had caused “more harm than good”.

Burnham said the government could keep the current arrangements, seek a customs union, return to the single market or “go all the way” in what would be full EU membership. Speaking to the BBC, he said ministers would examine “what is doable” and the “pros and cons” of each option.

He has also said that a second Brexit referendum is a possibility as part of his review of Britain’s relationship with the EU. He said that the UK’s position in Europe “isn’t good enough” and that he would consider a “whole range of options” including rejoining the EU, returning to the customs union and a Canada-style “associate membership”. Ironically, Andy Burnham's Business Secretary told BBC viewers just six days ago that an EU customs union would be "the worst of all worlds"

For my part, this is a giant nothing burger. It is not going to happen. The EU is barely inclined to change the existing relationship without major (and deeply unpopular) concessions on fishing and free movement, and has zero interest in taking us into a customs union. There is no re-joining the single market without joining Efta and the EEA. There’s even less enthusiasm for a protracted accession process that will be reversed by the next right wing government. There is also no such thing as a Canada-style “associate membership”.

It is conceivable that Burnham could make it a vague manifesto commitment regarding the EU but there’s nothing he can actually deliver on short of a clunky SPS deal nobody cares about.

Essentially, this is a PM who is promising all things to all factions of the left, with a view to uniting them to beat a fragmented right. He won't do half the things he says he will, but he's just smart enough to know that the median left wing voter was born yesterday. Consequently, I still wouldn't rule out an early election. He'll go for it before he gets found out.

Lembit Öpik, meanwhile, reckons that by proposing to rejoin the European Union, Burnham has just turned the next General Election into a second EU referendum. But in a sense, it already is. Whether either side recognises it or not, the next election is a continuation of Brexit politics. The question of who actually runs Britain and in whose interests was never properly resolved. Certainly the Brexit treaty arrangements did not satisfy anyone, and were only ever going to be temporary. Reform is apparently set on demolishing the lot of it (if Danny Kruger’s scribblings are anything to go by).

The idea, though, that we can simply re-join without referendum is for the birds. In my view this is the thing that would bring us to the brink of civil war, not least because I will start it. If we end up back having to write about customs unions and aubergine marketing standards again then I'm just going to skip straight to the suicide vest stage. I can't go through all that again. My poor brain can’t take it.

Either way, re-joining the EU doesn't rebuild power stations. It doesn't rebuild oil refineries or steel mills. Quite the opposite in fact. It doesn't make any facet of our decrepit governance function any better. Re-joining isn't a magical time machine that takes us back to 2016. It doesn't undo the costs of lockdown or reverse the Boriswave. In most practical respects you would be hard pressed to notice we'd re-joined, not least because we never set about dismantling the regulatory constructs of the EU. All it would really do is bake in the decline.

In some respects, re-joining would be quite entertaining since Euro-elections would likely result in a full house of Restore Britain MEPs just around the time Germany falls to the AfD. Regardless of what the British progressive left thinks, time does not stand still on the continent.

I think it safe to say this is all little more than a feel-good conference gimmick, because nothing Burnham has said stands up to scrutiny, and the fact that we’re talking about it at all tells us how little else he had to say about anything. These days the EU is a space filler debate we have when there’s bog all else going on.

To take this remotely seriously I would have to take Burnham seriously, but I’ve seen nothing to indicate that he is a man of intellect or substance. Nothing he says or does is sincere. Everything about the man is fake. Most of what he believes can, should or will happen will crash into the reality barrier before the next budget. He's already a lame duck PM. He just doesn't know it yet.

Shabana Mahmood has signalled she could water down her plans to make it harder for foreign workers to claim permanent residence in the UK, amid growing demands for a U-turn from cabinet colleagues and unions.

If Mahmood does this, under the Home Office "high case" scenario, 2.2 million migrants will settle, peaking at 620,000 in 2028, dwarfing the current record of 241,192 in 2010. More people could settle in the next 4 years than the whole of 1960 to 1990. Indefinite leave to remain gives a person the right to live, work and study in the UK for as long as they like and apply for benefits if they are eligible.

One tweeter suggests the Home Office model is only for main applicants and dependants that have previously been granted an entry clearance visa. It then uses settlement rates from migrant journey data of previous migrant cohorts and rolls this forward to 2021+ arrivals.

There is a very high likelihood that even the Home Office "high" estimate is an understatement, because as the Migration Advisory Committee have shown, migrants from poorer countries have higher stay rates, and the Boriswave is overwhelmingly made up of lower skill and lower wage migrants than previous cohorts. Once a migrant has ILR, they can apply to sponsor additional family members over, which would not be captured in this projection.

Overall, the MAC finds that five-year stay rates have risen steadily in recent years, from 74% for those arriving in 2014 to 85% for those arriving in 2019, and vary significantly across a range of factors. Migrants from wealthier countries are less likely to stay long term, while those from Africa, Southern Asia, and non-EU European countries show the highest retention.

On salary, migrants initially earning less than £40,000 have the highest stay rates compared to migrants on higher salary bands, while those earning over £125,000 show the lowest rates of long-term retention. The MAC cautions, however, that the true departure rate among the highest earners may be even higher than the data suggests, since longer initial visa durations for this group make early exits harder to detect.

In short, this is a massive influx of garbage immigration that isn’t wanted or needed. This is immigration which overwhelmingly affects the lives of working class Britons - for the worse. That this relaxation is demanded by the trade unions is a signal as to how British institutions have been captured to serve an ani-British agenda.

In my view, this is an incredibly dangerous thing to do. The Boriswave was never wanted in the first place, and happened in direct contravention of voter’s wishes expressed at the ballot box in the referendum and subsequent elections. To make the Boriswave permanent is another slap in the face.

If this goes ahead then puts the next right wing government into unprecedented territory where it will have to retroactively disapply acquired rights, turning our backs on several legal and moral conventions. It all but guarantees an autocratic right wing backlash. Leaving the ECHR is now a certainty whether it’s a good idea or not. Meanwhile, it sends a less that subtle message that the wishes of the British people, particularly the working class, are last in the pecking order.

This is precisely why public order is set to unravel. They can bang Danny Tommo up, making a martyr of him, but it rather looks like he will come home to quite a healthy mountain of donations, thereby setting the precedent that if you step up, the wider public has your back. Consequently, there are plenty more where he came from, and if they’re going to bang you up just for popping a dinghy, you may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.

If the powers that be were looking to escalate matters, they are going the right way about it. We’re starting to see all the classic signals in Ireland, and I would not be sleeping easy if I was a British judge.

This, however, is with the caveat that this policy announcement was one given to the Labour Party conference, therefore entirely disposable. Mahmood may look at the polls and think twice. You do have to wonder what sort of rank imbecile you have to be to look at a healthy poll lead and conclude that it's time to fling open the borders to Afghans and Palestinians. The rhetoric alone may be enough to throw Reform a lifeline.

One quick administrative note; the other day, I asked readers if they would consider taking out a paid subscription to keep me in business. To all those who have, I just want to pass on my sincere thanks. Operating on small margins, it makes HUGE difference. Thank you.

I don’t really want to write much more about Restore Britain. I think it’s largely run its course. The people running the party, in a very real sense, do not know what they are doing. It’s following the Reform pattern of electioneering for its own sake because the people running the party don’t know what else to do, and think it’s the primary function activity of a political party.

The objective, though, is not winning elections. The objective is to become a government. To do that, you need the ideas base and the people. The job is to build a platform you can present to the people as an alternative. If you’re not doing that then all you are doing is making noise - and noise does not translate into momentum.

You may recall a few years back when Farage departed Ukip for the final time. What followed was a relatively high profile battle of succession. There was no more political mileage in Ukip, but for some it was worth contesting just for the right to control the intellectual property.

With that came brand recognition (albeit badly tainted) and a sizable social media presence. Even now, the Ukip X account has 216,000 followers (compared to Restore’s 385k). As an online megaphone, that’s pretty big, but it doesn’t mean anything in the real world. Ukip is a spent force and everyone involved knows it.

You can throw a lot of money at building an online platform, but at the end of the day, it’s just a marketing channel. While that is a major asset in politics, it is no use if the product itself isn’t up to anything. As far as the product goes, Restore Britain is still pretty much Rupert Lowe and his largely unknown underlings - and is no more likely to withstand the departure of its leader than Reform is.

As much as the party is not attracting serious people (and, in fact, is actively repelling them), there is no coherent ideas base driving anything they say. As such, everything that comes through the social media megaphone is undisciplined and ill-directed shouting.

The time to address these issues was during the design phase, but Restore Britain didn’t really have one. It was launched on the whim of its leader, and these foundational errors are not going to be corrected. It is now widely acknowledged even by its own members that it will not fulfil its promise of becoming a serious alternative to Reform by 2029. Mostly likely never.

From here, all it can really do is go through the motions until it runs out of steam, in the blind hope that maybe one day Reform will implode, and they inherit the crown as the de facto anti-establishment right wing party. It will limp on because its supporters are too heavily invested (emotionally and financially) to see it for what it really is.

Moreover, it fulfils a certain need in its supporters who need to feel like they are doing something useful with their political energies (even if they aren’t). The alternative is to face the bleak reality that party politics is a non-starter, the right is probably going to lose in 2029, and owing to its lack of competence and coherence, it doesn’t even matter if it wins for all that it actually accomplishes.

I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to face that reality. For many it is preferable to keep your sense of hope hooked up to a political life support machine, or you just end up being a cantankerous misanthropic blogger.

The problem with that is that Restore, much like Reform, becomes displacement activity because the people involved don’t know what else to do. The habit (and tradition) on the right is to start new political enterprises to great fanfare and then slowly watch them die. It never occurs to us to try anything different. The right does not do strategic thinking.

The obvious point for me is that party politics is a dead end. The Tories are sufficiently entrenched in British political life that they will linger on, and hold on to most of the safe shire seats, while Reform soaks up most of the energy to no useful purpose. Sooner or later, Farage will depart, and the party has to strike a bargain with the Tories, resulting in more or less the same kind of right wing rainbow coalition the Tory party was in 2019.

From there, such a coalition probably would win but only on the basis of Labour outstaying its welcome - but again we end up with an ideologically muddled centre right party with a revolutionary rump. We’ve already seen how that plays out - and we don’t have time to re-tread failed experiments.

It is worth recalling, then, that voting rituals are not the only expression of democracy. Protest and industrial action are just as legitimate, and if our votes do not result in the changes we demand, then we must use our collective leverage. This is something I outline in the latest interview below. We are running out of time to save Britain, and we need to shift it up a gear.

I am angry. I am angry because my country is being changed in a way I never consented to and never had a say in - when this is supposed to be a democracy. What’s being done is against the public will. Moreover, it is not a good change. It is change that isn’t workable and is not sustainable. It is dangerous.

In recent years we have seen growing sectarianism and separatism, as our inner cities transform into ethnic ghettos where there is no longer anything discernibly British left, unless you count post-industrial squalor.

What it leads to is a dysfunctional, ungovernable and corrupt society which eventually descends into chaos, anarchy and violence, where everyone is pitted against each other, social trust evaporates, and safety in public becomes a thing of the past. It also leads to more authoritarian government and abridgements to basic liberties just to prevent it all exploding.

This would be challenging even in optimal economic conditions, but the economic situation is bad and deteriorating all the time. Fuel costs are going up. Energy costs are going up. And that means the price of everything else is going up. The only thing that isn’t going up is wages. What that means is rising unemployment, shrinking disposable income and a major surplus of redundant males which leads to violence and organised crime.

The political landscape is also suboptimal to say the least. We have a PM who nobody voted for, leading a party that nobody especially wanted, and a political class that’s oblivious to the levels of public disaffection and anger. It is increasingly a law unto itself. This is exacerbated by massively broken and corrupted justice system that lets violent offenders and sex offenders walk free, while cracking down on any kind of dissent.

To then be told, amidst an energy crisis, a political crisis, a housing crisis, and an economic crisis, that we should simply suck it up, and endure insult after insult from the people who rule us (not least naturalising members of Hamas) is enough to push us to breaking point.

Over the last five years, we've seen an increasing tempo of protests and demonstrations and even riots. There have been plenty of warning signals about the overall disaffection, yet the message never reaches the politicians - who are too absorbed in their own narcissistic little bubbles. They seem to think this all happens in a vacuum.

If anything, the politicians are making it worse because we consistently see them distracted by trivia, living in a world of their own. They keep talking about conscription and the possibility of war when it’s largely escaped their attentions that our armed forces have been cut to the bone, and there are increasingly fewer people who would put their lives on the line for a country that treats them with contempt.

Increasingly, our country looks totally alien to us. Day to day life still ticks over as usual, but every day it becomes just that little bit more hostile, where nobody can look to the future with any sense of optimism. People will endure a great deal just so long as things are basically fine, but we’re racing up on a point where things will not be basically fine, where the necessities become luxuries, and poorer households face a winter of choosing between food and heating.

Meanwhile we see a bloated, incompetent, tone-deaf state, where nobody is ever held accountable, and they fritter our money away without any regard for where it came from. Our armed forces are suspending vital training while Ed Miliband hands over tens of millions to “Palestine”. You can take to social media to let off a bit of steam but you can never be too sure you won’t get a knock on the door from Big Brother.

And speaking of Palestine, we increasingly see all of Britain’s enemies congregating on our streets waving the flag of the Islamo-leftist revolution, while raising our own flag is gradually criminalised. We are more likely to see the flag of Palestine, Pakistan or the Trans lobby flying from public buildings than the cross of St George.

Not a single one of our institutions is immune from this ideological corruption. The town halls and the universities are marinated in it. Academia is increasingly skinsuit for Marxist activism while our town councils have more to say about Gaza than fixing potholes and local care services.

I often wonder when the day will be when it all implodes, but then I remind myself that we would never get such a merciful release. It’s just going to get imperceptibly worse, every day, for the foreseeable future, and there are no means at our disposal to arrest the decline - or hold them to account. It’s not even as though there is a competent alternative waiting in the wings.

You can expect people to maintain a certain decorum in a democracy if there is at least some light at the end of the tunnel - but in modern Britain, the rewards for hard work are minimal, and there is no hope that anything is going to get better.

Consequently, I don’t see Britain remaining a stable country for much longer. We’ve churned through half a dozen prime ministers in the last ten years, and latest caretaker doesn’t look like he will go the distance either. To get things back on track would mean going in a different direction to all of their political instincts, and they would rather watch Britain burn than admit their model is no longer working - and never worked in the first place.

So where even does that leave us? I can vent my anger with the best of them on social media. I can participate in empty voting rituals at election time. I can write blogs and even show up to the odd protest. But on an instinctive level we all know it’s meaningless. If participating in democracy through normal channels had any effect, we would not now be where we are. It suggests to me that we are in the last chance saloon, and may even have missed the off-ramp to avoid low level civil conflict.

All it’s going to tale is a single trigger moment. It might be another Southport style slaying, of a dingy migrant committing an act of barbarism. Or it could be something more mundane like the national grid collapsing on a day without wind. A functioning country is resilient to occasional bouts of unrest, but little by little the political class have robbed Britain of its resilience and exhausted the patience of its people.

We have already seen what it could look like. Recent disturbances in Northern Ireland give us a fairly accurate picture. Once word gets out that housing is allocated for illegal immigrants, it’ll go up in flames. I don’t even rule out the possibility of somebody burning down the barracks at Linton on Ouse. The state is certainly alert to that possibility which is why there are already security patrols.

That’s actually the worst part about it. While most politicians may be oblivious, the machinery of state knows there are consequences, but they’re still going to inflict it all on us anyway.

I think probably the main reason things haven’t kicked off already is because most people are just too busy trying to make ends meet to be following every last detail of what is being done to them. But when that’s no longer possible, they’re going to have a lot more time on their hands. Soon after, the anger will reach critical mass. If the public is even half as angry as I am, then it could very well be explosive.

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In the space of twenty-four hours we learn three things at once. An apparent Iranian plot against RAF Fairford has been thwarted. A former Hamas bodyguard, granted asylum and then a British passport, later used that status to help plot attacks on European Jews. And an Afghan small-boat arrival allegedly kidnapped and sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl in Belgium before smuggling her into Britain and living with her in Manchester.

On the same day Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announces she will reopen a refugee resettlement route that prioritises Afghan women and Palestinians - just as the government also announces its intention to seize empty properties. No co-incidence, one assumes.

The contrast is not subtle. British authorities will still arrest you for posting a “Fuck Hamas” meme. They will jail people for disabling inflatable boats. Meanwhile they naturalise a man, under a veil of secrecy, whose Hamas connections were a matter of public record - and continue to process thousands of Asylum claims from the same region.

It would be useful if someone in government could explain the operational logic of arresting five men with vans and suspected explosives two miles from Fairford while converting another former RAF station, Linton-on-Ouse, into housing for large numbers of young male asylum seekers. One base is treated as a high-value target that must be defended; the other is treated as spare capacity.

At this point this looks more like malevolence than incompetence - and I'm running out of lawful things to say about our current predicament. It is difficult to find civilised language because the language of normal politics no longer describes what we are watching. The question now is whether the British public will keep treating this as a policy disagreement or as something closer to a breach of the basic bargain between government and governed.

It’s my feeling that this is the point where the public has to go one further than protest because the regime believes it can do as it pleases. We are ruled by feckless braindead scum who seem to be going all out to make an enemy of the British people.

A government that still possessed a normal sense of self-preservation would treat the Fairford arrests as a warning about hostile states and their proxies, the Hamas case as a warning about asylum and naturalisation, and the Manchester case as a warning about what the small-boat pipeline actually carries. Instead the Home Secretary’s announcement lands as if none of those stories had happened.

The message is that the pipeline will be regularised, not closed; that “vulnerable” cohorts will be prioritised by category rather than by individual risk; and that former airfields and hotels will absorb the overflow while the public is told to be patient and generous.

That is why the language of ordinary politics feels useless. Ordinary politics assumes a shared premise: that the first duty of the state is the security of the people already here. When that premise is treated as optional, or as something to be balanced against a moral performance for international NGOs and domestic activists, argument about “numbers” and “backlogs” becomes a sideshow.

The live question is whether the country is still being governed as a nation with a right to refuse risk, or as a holding area whose objections are a public-order and political comms problem. Right now, the public is entitled to conclude that the regime has gone feral, and that the normal democratic process is dead - especially when the political focus will centre of the “far right”, as though this were happening in a vacuum.

The PM has today described migrant protests led by Danny Tommo as "the worst kind of hateful behaviour" which is yet another indication that Pollyanna Burnham is away with the fairies. Those of you who pay attention to far right demonstrations on the continent will know that the Patriotic Platform outings in recent weeks are remarkably tame by contrast. Danny Tommo is nowhere close to a “far right thug”, but on present trajectory, they will come out of the woodwork eventually, and probably not before time.

Labour will spend the next week talking about “hate”, “the far right” and “community cohesion” because those phrases are their political currency. The rest of us, meanwhile, are watching with dismay as the country disintegrates, and in horror as the only thing protecting us for further invasion is the British weather. The only remaining question is how long the public pretends that answer is still voting.

A country can survive bad policy - and even bad government. But it cannot survive a governing class that has changed sides without admitting it. When the state starts to regard its own people as the problem to be contained, and the outside world as the constituency to be served, the nation has not been reformed. It has been quietly reclassified as territory. That is the wider fact underneath today’s squalid details, and it will outlast the news cycle even if Labour spends the week congratulating itself for spotting “hate” in all the wrong places.

A few people have attempted to convince me this week that Tommy Robinson and Danny Tommo are grifting over this whole thing. But I judge on results. Certainly, a bunch of black clad lads showing up at Portsmouth put the shits up the establishment, to the extent that they have quadrupled security around dinghy migrant operations, and we can see that the police are on high alert. This is costing them and eating into their budgets.

As to Tommo puncturing a migrant boat, the establishment response tells us a lot, and further exposes the two tier justice dynamic. I notice that if you are a moslem who batters a police officer in an airport, the trial will be set back for months on end, and the police will liaise with “community leaders” - but when a white man commits a misdemeanour in protest of an invasion, the justice system works at lightning speed.

Of course, I do understand why. When it comes to matters of public order, it is necessary for the state to expedite the process. The social contract demands that vigilantism is stamped out. The other side of that contract is that the state will actually enforce the law on our behalf. When it chooses to be selective over which laws it will enforce, they can't be surprised to see more of the same.

Because of this, I expect it will have operational consequences because Tommo has sent a clear message that members of the public have the means to go one further. This time it was an empty boat. Next time, who knows?

This has the Guardianistas quaking in their boots. It’s comical because they think this is a frightening rise of the far right. It shows how parochial they are. They evidently don’t look at fringe politics on the continent. They have an actual far right and they really aren’t messing around. The British version is tame by contrast.

But with just two or three operations, Danny Tommo has made a very serious statement and the vibe shift is palpable. Best of all, nobody got hurt, and Tommo is facing a relatively trivial charge. Shutting down RNLI operations was the icing on the cake. It takes guts to put something on the line like that. That’s why this isn’t a grift.

I have in the past been quite scathing about Tommy Robinson. I often don’t like the way he operates. He very obviously has a defiant personality and he simply cannot help himself - and that, more than anything else, is the reason he ends up in jail. Contempt of court is not something you play fast and loose with. But you can’t take it away from the man that he is prepared to go to jail to make a point - and we need men like that.

I was very taken by something Tommy Robinson said the other day about this. Prison very much is “mind breaking”, as is the legal process (which is at least half of the punishment). I’ve only had a taster of this having been detained for just a few hours over a tweet. It is not an experience I am in any hurry to repeat. To experience it even once and risk it again requires a certain resilience.

As such, living the life of a professional agitator changes things. Life doesn’t go back to normal. Again, this is something I feel on my own shoulders, albeit to a much lesser extent. I sail pretty close to the wind with my tweets, because certain things need to be said, and as a consequence I’m never truly relaxed at home. I fully expect that one evening I’ll get another knock on the door, which fills me with anger and dread, because I don’t know how I will respond next time. I have lost all trust in the police.

If we want people to put something on the line, then we do have to have their backs. Once you’re in that deep, there is no returning to a normal life, and even large sums of money do not compensate for the lack of privacy and peace. Moreover, they do need a decent legal defence they can trust. The best part about it, nobody is forcing you to contribute. If you don’t approve or you think it’s a grift, you don’t have to donate.

To my mind, in the last three weeks, Danny Tommo has accomplished more than the last three big Tommy Robinson jamborees put together, and there are now plenty of men standing ready to assemble when the moment calls for it. It has my compete backing and I am looking forward to seeing what they do next. I wish I had half their influence because I have ideas of my own on how to disrupt the system.

There is now no doubt in anyone’s mind that the government has zero intention of stopping the boats, and will continue to distribute dangerous illegal immigrants into our communities. They have made it quite clear they hold us in contempt, and we are obliged to remind them that it cuts both ways.

Danny Tommo is right that it does have to be non-violent and disciplined, and rioting isn’t going to achieve very much. Tommo is establishing techniques that can be replicated elsewhere, so that independent cells can cause disruption without even having to break the law. Forcing them to deploy a massive police escort for migrant buses is terrible optics for the regime, and we can force them to have to escort every bus every time we get wind of migrant movements.

With very little effort, we can make the entire operation expensive and unsustainable and reduce the effectiveness of the police - and force them to spend a fortune on surveillance and OpSec. A successful protest is one that forces authorities to deploy resources in ways they don’t want to.

I think we’re way past voting and family friendly Tommy Robinson jamborees in London. It doesn’t work. We have no option but to up the ante, and if you’re unable to participate, either show your support or just stay out of the way. Or better still, show us how it’s done otherwise. I’m all ears.

If I were to criticise Danny Tommo, I’d say it was time to up the frequency and intensity of protest operations, but for that the movement needs to grow, and we need a lot more men willing to put their freedom on the line. That’s what the establishment fears the most which is why they throw the book at Tommo and Robinson as a deterrent. We need to send a message that we do not fear them.

I appreciate that a lot of my anti-Reform shtick is boring, negative and repetitive. It’s boring to even write it, but that goes with the territory of being a political commentator. But for me it tells its own story that most of the criticisms I was making two years ago (feels like an eternity) remain the same.

The party is still an overly centralised private company, reliant on millionaire donors, where members have little to no influence over what it says and does. There is still no obvious successor to Farage, it still has no technical policy competence, it has only one formal policy document to its name, they still routinely contradict themselves and each other, and policy is still whatever Farage says it is.

Meanwhile, I agree with Zia Yusuf more often than not, but other than that, there is nobody in the party who is remotely impressive. I’m not looking at a party that’s ready to take power that knows what it would do with power, and I don’t see anyone in the party who would be an effective minister. There is still no intellectual foundation, and no real evidence that one is under construction.

Routinely we are told that the party is professionalising, but that is all contingent on your definition of the word. They have professionalised the electioneering and the presentation layer, but not the political organisation. It is still very much Farage and his hapless entourage - and I don’t really see that dynamic changing with Yusuf at the helm.

For me, the Channel 4 sting operation was quite instructive. You do have to wonder why James Orr, supposedly a fearsome intellect, recruited for the purposes of building an intellectual foundation, was reduced to grubby back room deals to raise money. It was never his function. But that tells us everything about the culture of the organisation, where everything is done in the leader’s own image.

Die-hard supporters will say they do not care about any of this, because the objective is to “smash the uniparty”, which is a wholly understandable (if a little nihilistic) objective. I don’t see that it gets us anywhere if it produces an incompetent and corrupt government that won’t last a year without imploding under the weight of its own lack of preparedness.

I don’t think any of this is lost on the wider electorate. There’s a reason Reform peaked in the polls some time ago, there’s a reason it underperforming in by-elections, and there’s a reason it is bleeding support. More and more people are waking up to what it actually as, as opposed to what they hoped it was. While there are the makings of a political party there, it will remain a dysfunctional personality cult, and it’s no use pretending otherwise.

That doesn’t mean people won’t pretend otherwise. Some people have invested their heart and soul into it, in the hope of toppling the regime, and those people will be in denial until the day it goes pop. I can understand it too. In order to toil away in politics, you have to buy into a delusion otherwise it would seem wholly futile. We’d never have left the EU had people been realistic about the chances of leaving the EU in the early days of Ukip.

But this isn’t that. It’s not about whether the right can win a vote. The objective here is a ruthlessly competent, government that’s actually on our side. For Reform, that’s too big of an ask. The culture Farage brings to the party does not result in competence, and you can never wholly trust populists because policy is only ever calibrated for the week in which it is useful.

I have always know that Reform was a cul-de-sac. Attempts were made to give it direction at the very beginning, but that all came to nothing, and the moment Farage came back into the fray, it became a futile endeavour. All it can really do is sabotage the Tory party. While that is useful purpose in its own right, it doesn’t really get us anywhere. We are still lumbered with the most detestable politicians of all time.

What we’re now faced with is a fragmented right, with no party capable of winning in its own right, and no party that could form the kind of government we need. You can’t build a bridge with rotten timber.

It's not just Reform which is dead in the water and holed below the waterline either. We can now say much the same about Restore Britain. If you examine Rupert Lowe's blistering attack on Reform around the time of his departure, he set out certain benchmarks of how a serious party should operate. His own endeavour now fails by every single one of his own metrics.

The party now stands as a similar cult of personality, with a similar lack of coherence and coordination, with Lowe taking a similarly hands-off approach to Farage, leaving the day to day running of messaging to proxies who don't even align with his own politics.

Not only is the party not attracting serious people, it is actively repelling them. Through its own ineptitude it has managed to alienate supporters on both wings of the party, while the quality of its output has been on a declining trajectory since day one. It also has serious reputational problems on account of the conduct of its activists.

Lowe's promise of putting together a "serious alternative" by 2029 is, putting it politely, not on target. Right now, all it's on course to achive is to deny Reform up to fifty seats, which makes it look like its only reason to exist is to prosecute a vendetta against Farage. Being that the case, Reform could very well choose to concentrate efforts on Great Yarmouth to split the vote just enough for Lowe to lose his seat. Lowe does not enjoy a big majority.

As it happens, I do see the utility in costing Reform a number of seats. Lowe is absolutely correct in saying that Farage should never be prime minister and Reform has no plan. It all just seems a little redundant being that Reform is a self-sabotaging enterprise that cannot withstand the misdeeds and incompetence of its own leadership.

Taken in the round, that leaves the right irreparably fragmented, incoherent and unelectable. Any hopes of dislodging the incumbent and "smashing the uniparty" in 2029, or before, are now ashes. It would now appear that the decline trajectory has to run its course to its inevitable conclusion. Consequently, our last hope is to take this to the streets. We are not voting our way out of this mess.